Treatment of Culture-Specific Items of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in Translation from English to Presian

In the realm of the recently established discipline called ‘Translation Studies’ there are quite many number of ambiguities waiting to be clarified and ‘explicated’ by the researchers. Among those interesting and yet ‘amazing’ factors which is inextricably fused with the lives of the all players in the ‘network’ of translation is ‘culture’. This fabulous concept inflicts undeniable effects on the process from its very beginning to the time the produced texts meet the light. Literature consisting of the purest and finest words harmoniously structured in the frame of rhythmically built units of language needs some elaboration as far as translation of it is concerned. Children’s literature, as a lovely sub-section of literature, assumes utmost significance in that it helps the children gain knowledge not only about the world but also about the language itself. The present research, incorporating the views on translation provided by Peter Newmark (1988, p..95) and the model of translation criticism by Drik Delabastita tries to explore the most frequently used strategies in translation of the culture-specific items of the children literature with a focus on select novel namely Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (part I, 15 chapters) translations by Vida Eslamieh and Mohammad Norollahi. The research compares the two translated versions. It needs mentioning that highly mysterious and fantastic aspects of Harry Potter’s novels is rooted in the source culture’s history and culture; the translation of which demanding deep familiarity with the culture of the target as well as the source context. The outlet of the research has been developed on the basis of practical models of translation that were gathered from a number of studies. The current product-oriented and descriptive research is an attempt to distinguish and describe the culture-specific items and analyze the strategies applied in dealing with them in the corpus of the research. Dealing with culture-specific items in the first part of the corpus of the research in their integrity, one hundred and eighty six culture-specific items were manually collected and systematically classified into five categories of 1- Material culture, 2- Ecology, 3- Concepts, Customs and Organizations 4- Social culture 5-Gestures and Habits and fifteen sub-categories including: 1- foods, clothes, towns, houses, transport, artifacts, 2- flora, fauna and plains, 3- social, religious, historical, political and artistic, 4- work and leisure (games and sports), 5-gestures and habits best on classification presented by Peter Newmark and in the second step, they were analyzed and studied based on the five strategies contained in the model of Delabastita namely: 1- Substitution 2- Repetition (partial-total), 3- Addition, 4- Omission and 5-Permutation. The present research reveals that material culture, especially food were the most frequently used Culture-Specific items in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince also repetition-partial has been introduced as the most pervasive and frequently used strategy applied in translating the culture- specific items in this part of the corpus of the research.

کلیدواژه ها:

Literary translation ، Translation ، Translation strategy ، Children’s literature ، Delabastita’s model andCulture-specific Items (CSIs)